Foreclosure-related vacancy rates

The national foreclosure crisis has caused there to be millions more vacancies in our housing stock than before. Vacant homes lower their community’s property values and quality of life. Neighbors and public officials know foreclosed homes sit empty for months, but precise measures of foreclosure-related vacancy are rare. Using data from Cuyahoga County, Ohio, I trace the rise and fall in the vacancy rates of homes during the 18 months following their foreclosure. Ominously, the data suggest that foreclosure may permanently scar some homes. Foreclosed homes still have higher vacancy rates than neighboring houses two to five years after a sheriff’s sale.Foreclosure - Ohio

A conference on consumer protection in financial product markets

A conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland engendered an informative discussion of consumer protection in financial products markets. Anticipating significant changes in financial regulation, the conference asked the question, "How could regulators successfully protect consumers?" It intentionally looked beyond the existing institutions. The first of three panels discussed how consumers gather information and process it to make purchase decisions. Lessons learned from research on food labeling and shopping were discussed. Another panel examined the roles of professionals who guide consumers through a marketplace. Panelists discussed the legal obligations of brokers and rating agencies. The final panel focused on product preapproval processes like the FDA's regulation of pharmaceuticals and the Consumer Product Safety Commission's post-market tracking of injuries. This Policy Discussion Paper summarizes the presenters' material and draws out themes that point a way forward for efficient, competitive financial product markets that are safe for consumers.Consumer protection

Private-activity municipal bonds: the political economy of volume cap allocation

State governments allocate authority, under a federally imposed cap, to issue tax-exempt bonds that fund “private activities” such as industrial expansion, student loans, and low-income housing. This paper presents political economy models of the allocation process and an empirical analysis. Due to an idiosyncrasy of the tax code, the annual per capita volume cap varies widely across states. I estimate that, on average, there is an additional $0.80 per capita per year of borrowing for each additional dollar per capita of volume cap. This confirms that the cap is a binding constraint in most cases, and authority to issue tax-exempt bonds is a scarce resource. I find that mortgage revenue bonds and student loan bonds are the most responsive to differences in the cap. The gross state product and employment in manufacturing and utilities drive allocations to industrial development bonds and utilities bonds. While controlling for the size of the education sector, I find campaign contributions from educational interests are associated with higher authorizations for student loans. One result runs counter to the theoretical models. Higher campaign contributions from utilities interests are associated with lower utilities borrowing. Unions do not have an independent effect on allocations.Municipal bonds ; Tax exemption

Making financial markets safer for consumers: lessons from consumer goods markets and beyond

In the wake of the mortgage meltdown, policymakers are discussing how best to protect consumers in financial product markets.Consumer protection ; Financial markets

iEEG-BIDS, extending the Brain Imaging Data Structure specification to human intracranial electrophysiology

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven specification for organizing neuroscience data and metadata with the aim to make datasets more transparent, reusable, and reproducible. Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data offer a unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution measurements of the living human brain. To improve internal (re)use and external sharing of these unique data, we present a specification for storing and sharing iEEG data: iEEG-BIDS

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors